Many women bear the legacy of domestic violence. Some transmit survivor knowledge from mother to daughter without ever naming their abuse, without claiming their right to be safe, without affirming their bodily integrity or demanding equality and dignity in their families, or without giving voice to an alternative life without violence.

Vella Pelletier grew up in a home where day in and day out, her father beat and otherwise traumatized her mother. Though some days Vella's father was loving to her and her mother, the reality and threat of physical violence colored the choices Vella and her mother made while they attempted to gauge his moods and comply with his demands. His apparent motive was to keep her mother off balance. Some days Vella's mother maintained hope about her marriage, while the next she was trying to find a way out for herself and her child.

When Vella was eleven years old, fearing that her father meant to see his lethal threat against her mother through, Vella sat on her father's back and pounded his head with the butt of a gun until he was unconscious. In the heat of the moment, the young girl focused on her mother's safety in the face of her father's attack without considering that her father's battering of her mother was a symptom of a larger problem that deprived her mother, and herself, of their right to live, to love, and to be free. But as history often shows, once the patterns that define domestic violence gain a foothold, battered women find it increasingly difficult to escape or even envision a more peaceful life.

Intimate partner abuse was the interpretive framework through which Vella Pelletier understood her life. As her mother before her did, Vella married a man, who soon after their wedding, began a pattern of physical and emotional abuse. Just like her father, Vella's husband Gene had moods like a seesaw. One day he was sorry for hurting her and begging forgiveness; the next he returned to his brutal ways.

Several times Gene Gogan threatened to kill Vella and her dog and to burn down their house. He was known to friends and neighbors as a man with an explosive temper who made no attempt to hide his rage against his wife, even in public. Both the county sheriff's department and the state police had responded to several incidents of domestic violence at the Gogan home in Hartland, and though Gene's behavior did not change, no charges were ever brought.

Vella attempted to escape the relationship by seeking the services of a battered woman's shelter three or four times, but each time she returned to her broken marriage to care for Gene because he was ill. The abuse had become normative, and Vella's role as Gene's wife seemed inviolable. He was all she knew, and she felt unable and unwilling to put the abuse behind her, no matter how bad it was.

She held fast to the thin strand of belief that her broken marriage did not need to remain as it was and that if she demonstrated her love for her husband, he would change. The glimmer of hope that urged her to envision a more just way of life somehow prevailed over despair.

As her husband's health continued to decline, his abusive behavior escalated. Although her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants, Vella declined to take them because she feared that if she fell asleep, he would kill her. She ate little and became exhausted.

Then one morning, Gene Gogan lifted his wife roughly into the air and smashed her head into the bottom of a high cupboard. He then put two loaded rifles into their truck and forced Vella to get in. He drove to a remote site near his hunting camp in Mayfield Township about 25 miles from their home. He parked the vehicle in a field and ordered his wife to get out. Vella felt certain that he would shoot her if she did, so she refused. Somehow she connected with her deep nature that valued her life over death. She unlocked her secret door behind which she kept her long-dead dreams, hopes, and goals that her predator husband methodically sought to destroy. The tears she wept were not saline, but blood ­ lifeblood ­ that stained all the clothes in her wardrobe. She could no longer wear the mask she had used to disguise her pain. (Estes 1992, 53, 55)

Thoughts of the day's events haunted Vella. Childhood memories of her mother's abuse by her father, and thoughts of her own longtime abuse flooded her that night as she lay beside Gene in their bed. She was sure he would kill her before morning light. But she chose life. Rather than wait for him to hold a gun to her head or a knife to her throat, she chose to use killing violence in what she considered to be an act of self-defense. Vella shot him once in the ear while he lay sleeping. That first shot did not kill him, so Gene sat up and reached for his own pistol. Before he could use it, Vella shot him twice more.

At one time, Vella had worked as a butcher's assistant. Recalling that experience helped her to figure out how to dispose of Gene's body since he was too heavy for her to carry out in one piece. She cut the body into seventeen parts, as she would have any other animal in the butcher shop, and wrapped each piece in a plastic bag.

Her professional nature took over, and soon she had wiped clean the sites where both the shooting and butchering had taken place. Then she returned to the place in Mayfield Township near where Gene had driven her the day before. She parked near the woods and chose to reclaim her selfhood. In that wild place, she dug one hole for each part of her husband's body by hand, buried them and covered them with leaves.

Vella's sister Carlene Pelletier came to visit her a couple of days later. After Vella told her sister about what had happened, they drove to the county sheriff's department where Vella turned herself in. In a court proceeding shortly afterward, she was involuntarily committed to Augusta Mental Health Institute after professionals deemed her to be a danger to herself. In court some weeks later, she pled not guilty to murder and invoked the battered woman defense.

Her attorneys explained that though Vella did not deny responsibility for her husband's death, she was defending herself when she shot her husband. They maintained from the day of her arrest that her psychiatric condition was caused by being subjected to more than three decades of domestic abuse.

Maine is one of the first states to accept a defense that allows evidence of prior abuse to be admitted at trial. In 1981, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine vacated a judgment against Linda Anaya, who had been found guilty of manslaughter in her boyfriend's death. The appeals court found that the presiding judge in her trial erred by wrongly excluding testimony relating to the "battered wife syndrome."

The excluded evidence included testimony by a doctor who had treated Linda Anaya at least five times for injuries such as concussion, black eye, and laceration of her arm. The judge had refused to allow defense counsel to question the doctor about the battered wife syndrome or give his opinion that Anaya was a victim. Although at the end of the trial her attorney admitted that Anaya killed her boyfriend, he also said that she acted reasonably to protect herself from another beating.

Despite the defense attorney's best efforts, the jury found her guilty of manslaughter. On appeal, the Law Court exonerated Anaya. (State v. Anaya, 438 A. 2d 892 [1981 Maine]).

Linda Anaya's case bears striking similarities to that of Vella Gogan. In Vella's case, District Court Judge Douglas Clapp said after the probable cause hearing on November 18, 1999, "The entire weight of evidence suggests that the events of this crime are uniquely and closely related to Ms. Gogan's chronic, dysfunctional relationship with the victim." Once she was no longer considered to be a danger to herself, Vella was released from the Augusta Mental Health Institute to her brother's house. Judge Clapp accepted Gogan's home valued at $50,000 and her brother's properties in Canaan valued at $150,000 as surety for her bail.

Vella's release amounted to house arrest. She could leave her brother Walter Pelletier's home only for scheduled medical, psychiatric, and legal appointments. The state had the right to make random searches of her brother's home.

Under Maine law, bail is intended not to punish an accused person before trial, but rather to ensure her appearance in court. In court records, police officials had noted that Vella Gogan was a "docile and passive individual with no history or reputation for violence or aggression." When she was released from AMHI, after a two-months-long involuntarily commitment, a staff psychologist said that Vella posed no "imminent danger to herself or others as long as she obtains spousal abuse counseling and regular psychiatric appointments."

One must question, then, what ends does such a high bail serve? Does the defendant's gender have any effect on setting bail?

Behind the scenes, prosecutors and defense attorneys discussed the case. They faced overwhelming evidence from four psychological reports, including one by the State Forensic Service, that Gogan was in fact a severely battered woman who was convinced that the day her husband would try to kill her was imminent.

From years of abuse, Vella had felt her universe of possible responses slipping away. Vella's defense team believed they had a strong case to show that Vella killed her husband in self-defense even though he was asleep in bed when she first shot him. However, later in court, the state prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Andrew Benson, said, "If you close your eyes, you would think Vella Gogan, rather than Gene Gogan, is the victim in this case."

The prosecutor's statement smacks of his bias against women and misunderstanding of women's criminality.

In the face of mounting mitigating evidence, however, the state offered a plea bargain: Vella could plead guilty to manslaughter and receive a sentence of fifteen years in prison, but serve only six years with six years probation. Her other alternatives were to go to trial and risk being convicted of murder, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty-five years, or wager on a judge either to acquit her or find her guilty of manslaughter that carries no required minimum sentence.

After much soul-searching and with the specter of a lengthy prison sentence weighing heavily on her mind, Vella pleaded guilty to manslaughter on March 20, 2001. At the two hour sentencing hearing on April 5, 2001, Vella told the judge, "I'm very sorry for what I did to Gene. I'm sorry for hurting his family and my family. I loved Gene very much, but I thought he was going to kill me and I didn't want to die." She is now serving her six-year sentence at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.

What is society to make of Vella Gogan's imprisonment for killing her abusive husband in self-defense? It is clear, as Vella's defense attorneys pointed out, that state prosecutors failed to understand the case. Vella Gogan was a captured woman, the victim of her predatory husband's abuse and obsessive need to control her. She killed him to defend her own life, a life fraught with uncertainty and terror.

Rather than living freely as every person is entitled, Vella was rendered powerless by her husband's control over and persecution of her. He may have promised to make her a queen when they first met, but in actuality, he was planning her psychic, if not physical, murder. She chose a man who would be destructive to her life, as her mother did before her. Throughout her life, she was a survivor of loss: lost opportunities to pursue her life's hopes and dreams for herself and her children; lost self esteem that could have lifted her out of despair and loneliness; lost innate curiosity that could have pushed her toward discovery of what lies beneath her life; and missed chances to open the door to the secret room where her manifold losses lay hidden.

Vella also stands as a model for conjuring the necessary strength to choose life, even after having been beaten down for much of her existence. Rather than asking why she chose to kill rather than leave, the community should wonder why don't more abused women kill?

At the same time, public outrage was aimed primarily at this longtime battered woman. In a letter to the editor of the Bangor Daily News after Vella Gogan was released on bail, a Fairfield man wrote: "If Vella Gogan's husband had elected to end his 37-year abusive marriage by shooting his wife in the head three times, dismembering her body into 17 pieces and burying it throughout the woods near their hunting camp, would a Skowhegan judge rule that he poses no threat to others? I think not."

A statement written by one of Gene Gogan's nieces and read at Vella's sentencing hearing chastised the court for agreeing to what she felt was an inappropriate sentence that would have the effect of increasing the murder rate in the state. She also advised men who were in unhappy marriages to "sleep with one eye open."

The judge stood firm and said, "I don't think we're going to have husbands stacked up like cord word across the state" as a result of this sentence. He also said had he tried the case, based on the evidence as he knew it, that he probably would have found Gogan guilty of manslaughter.

Janet Mills, one of Vella Gogan's defense attorneys, told the court at her sentencing, "Vella Gogan is not a cold, calculating woman as the state would have you believe. There is no question that this woman is of no risk to anyone."

Another writer asks the question that many workers in the domestic violence field hear all too often. He writes, "Gogan claims she was abused for 37 years and was fearful for her life. Why would anyone take abuse for 37 years without doing something other than murdering someone?"

This writer may unwittingly have been wrestling with a retributive theory of justice. He began, though, without considering the injustice inherent in this case. "Because justice emerges out of protest against injustice, justice is not so much a state of being, as a struggle and a constant process. It is the process of correcting what is unjust. It is the process of providing new beginnings." (Lebacqz 1987, 255)

Meanwhile, though fifteen of the seventeen parts Gene Gogan was cut into were recovered, his thighs were never found. Vella's urge to run with the wolves saved her life. Her actions suggest that she had read and absorbed the wisdom found in "Women Who Run With the Wolves." (Estes 1992) Although "there is a natural censoring of all negative and painful events that occur in our lives," Vella overcame her fears and investigated the worst. (Ibid., 57)

Her recharged woman's intuition revealed Gene as predator of her body and intruder on her psyche. Rather than run away from the dark man, she literally dismembered him. (64).

She made an offering to the wild ones when she buried his flesh where they live. Whatever animal feasted on Gene's thighs shared survival knowledge with Vella. She can reclaim the missing parts of her husband that were likely eaten by coyotes to end her own trauma narrative and begin a new life, as one would render the "medicinal parts of deadly nightshade or the healing elements of the poisonous belladonna plant, and us[e] these materials for healing and helping."(65)

"Women find that as they vanquish the predator, taking from it what is useful and leaving the rest, they are filled with intensity, vitality, and drive. They have rendered from the predator what has been stolen from them. She is free to wrest the powers from the thing which assailed her and to turn those powers, which were once used against her, to her own well-suited and excellent uses." (Ibid.)

Despite my several attempts to meet with Ms. Gogan in prison so she could tell her own story, no such meeting occurred. Had she agreed to such a meeting, I might have asked her to describe her own vision of a peaceful life free from abuse. I wonder what she will do with her life as it begins anew after she is released from prison. I would love to take her to lunch.

A good ethic fosters a life free from abuse.